Start with the notion that numbers are numbers, so accountants turn everything into numbers and disregard meaning, culture actually. Then, you put IT under the CFO, so IT as a discipline focused on programmer efficency over operational efficency, which gives IT no incentive to be culturally aware. Here I mean functional cultures, not the monolithic corporate monoculture. So, IT systems are culturally insensitive. The numbers mean something, but only to the generalist that didn’t generate them, and that is that the numbers are something ignored.

Economically, the only meaningful number is the generalist decisionmaker’s paycheck. Economists tell us that the person with the highest incentive makes the best decision. The experts, the functional units, can’t make the best decisions from that perspective, so their systems are silo busted to create generalist fit no one systems.

Systems teach. If you use a spell checker, you spell the way it tells you to spell. If you use a voice command system, you talk the way it tells you to talk. If you know that some number is meaningless, you find some way to produce a better number. When the servers go down, the email goes down, and the internet is down, you go to lunch or home. When, the AC is off at work, you stay only long enough to get the absolute minimum done.

When people exhibit bad behaviors at work, managers fix the system. They know they can’t fix the worker. Thus, the systems evolve to make us all conform to the fixes.

I get a paycheck. I go to the bank. The bank checks that paycheck against a list. The list is nowhere to be found. I can’t get paid. Geez. The list is just an artifact used to make sure that I didn’t kite the check. Like, I’d want to go to prison. Well, someone did. They probably didn’t work for my company. But, the bank went through this and now sells the list as the ultimate preventative measure, a best practice. So again, the system evolved to the lowest, and we follow. I had no lunch that afternoon.

And, yeah, its a bad thing if you stick out by being too good. Your predecessors trained the managers to accept less than good work, and to provide less than an adequate schedule to get that minimal work done. You know better. Buy, hey, keep your mouth shut, or you’ve painted a target on your back. Crap teaches crap teaches crap, and somewhere in all of that you have to learn it.